Study Claims $41.5 Billion In Portable Game Piracy Losses Over Five Years

Gamasutra reports that Japan's Computer Entertainment Suppliers Association conducted a study to estimate the total amount of money lost to piracy on portable game consoles. The figure they arrived at? $41.5 billion from 2004 to 2009. Quoting: "CESA checked the download counts for the top 20 Japanese games at what it considers the top 114 piracy sites, recording those figures from 2004 to 2009. After calculating the total for handheld piracy in Japan with that method, the groups multiplied that number by four to reach the worldwide amount, presuming that Japan makes up 25 percent of the world's software market. CESA and Baba Lab did not take into account other popular distribution methods for pirated games like peer-to-peer sharing, so the groups admit that the actual figures for DS and PSP software piracy could be much higher than the ¥3.816 trillion amount the study found."

Comments

Re:Why, oh why do they do these studies

[w00tsauce]

Margin of error: 1337... This "study" is about as credible as the study on how fast the star wars kid swings his lightsaber done by the bob goatse institute for pwning.

I've lost several trillion dollars due to greed!

[Arancaytar]

I wanted people to give me a trillion dollars last year, but they didn't. They're so greedy and unthoughtful!

Re:About studying losses...

[EdgeyEdgey]

I would have charged them $50bn, so by not employing me they have made a saving already!
But now I'm going to have to write off $50bn of losses :-(

Re:All the money in the world.

[Myopic]

Redirecting that kind of money into the phantom sales scenario needed to back up these numbers literally flies in the face of economic reason.

Not literally.

Otherwise, great post.

Re:Why, oh why do they do these studies

[jollyreaper]

This is once again one of those numbers that will be thrown around by IP holders to get attention from the politicians. And yet the study does the same idiotic assumption as all the other ones.

You are such a cynical, suspicious person! It must feel so awful living inside your head. You probably aren't even able to form meaningful bonds with other people.

No, I'm sure this figure is completely accurate. After all, who knows an industry better than the people who work in it? These numbers should be every bit as accurate as BP's risk assessment for deep water drilling.